Apostille and legalisation are not rival products
People often shop for these as though they were two tiers of the same service, with the slip as the budget option. They are not. Legalisation names the goal — getting a British paper accepted somewhere else — and the treaty slip is simply the short way of reaching it. Where the short way is open, it is the entire route and nothing is missing from it.
Ecuador inside the Convention
Ecuador joined the Hague Apostille Convention in 2005. Since then its offices have accepted the slip on sight, in the standard shape every member country agreed on. That single fact is what removes the consular half of the job, and it is why old guidance written for the general case will overstate what this particular road asks of you.
The Wolverhampton to Ecuador route in practice
An apostille issued in Wolverhampton for use in Ecuador is in fact issued in Milton Keynes, since one national office does this work for the whole country and does it through the post. Nothing about the marking stage is local. What is local is where the record comes from, and the register office at the Civic Centre holds the civil records for this city.
Because the road has one desk on it rather than two, the plan is short. A signed paper goes out, a marked paper comes back, and you hand it over. The uncertainty people expect on this kind of errand mostly belongs to consular routes, where a person at the far end reviews the file before agreeing to stamp it.
What the short road costs
Two published figures cover it: £45 per document by post as standard, and £40 per document for a registered business using the next-day service. Both end in the same certificate. Timing is dominated by the post rather than the desk, so a file tied to a deadline abroad should leave the city with a comfortable margin around it.